David Hughes is the Daily Telegraph's chief leader writer. He has been covering British politics for 30 years.

The Gordon Brown/Alistair Darling suicide note

The more we learn about the Brown/Darling tax plans, the more they resemble events in that annus horribilis for Labour, 1992. That was the year the party – riding high in the polls – decided to deflect Tory charges of fiscal incompetence by producing what they claimed was a fully-costed "shadow budget".

Big mistake. Published six days into the election campaign, it showed that Labour was planning to increase the top rate of tax from 40p to 50p in the pound. It also planned to remove the exemption high earners enjoyed from national insurance contributions (NICs).

Sounds familiar? High earners were on Monday told they will face a new, 45 per cent, higher tax rate and it is widely assumed that Mr Brown is actually wedded to the idea of a 50 per cent rate so Monday was merely a first instalment.

As for NICs, they're on the way up as well.

In 1992, this spectacular own goal prompted the Tories to unleash their "tax bombshell" campaign that proved so effective in keeping Neil Kinnock out of 10 Downing Street.

Sixteen years on, and the tax bombshell propaganda is being dusted off by a grateful Conservative HQ.

To his credit Mr Kinnock, conscious that the NIC changes might scare people, had told a bunch of political journalists over dinner at Luigi's Restaurant in Covent Garden that he was pondering phasing in the NIC changes.

It showed the Labour leader had sounder political instincts than his Shadow Chancellor, the over-rated John Smith, who vetoed the phase-in idea when it emerged in the popular prints.

There is another difference. The 1992 Labour suicide note did not include a hike in VAT. The 2008 version does. We learned yesterday that after the 13-month cut in VAT to 15 per cent in a panicky attempt to revive consumer spending, Brown/Darling want to increase it to 18.5 per cent in 2011/12. And the BBC's Nick Robinson reports the Treasury planning a further VAT hike to 20 per cent to fill the Â£100 billion black hole in the public finances.

If the Tories can't make merry with all this, then they don't deserve to form a government.